A large dairy manufacturer running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise was burning up to 412 hours of manual work every time it needed to update 550+ product records. The fix wasn't a bigger team, it was Click2Clone, a one-click record-duplication app that turned "rebuild from scratch" into "clone, tweak, done."
A large dairy manufacturer running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise was burning up to 412 hours of manual work every time it needed to update 550+ product records. The fix wasn't a bigger team, it was learning how to using a one-click duplication app that turned "rebuild from scratch" into "clone, tweak, done."
Here's exactly how it played out.
Key Takeaways
- Manually recreating a single CRM product record can take 30-45 minutes
- A 550-item packaging update meant up to 412 hours of manual work
- Click2Clone clones records, and their related child records
- Bulk cloning let the team update hundreds of records at once, not one at a time
- Required fields (like version and status) can be updated automatically during the clone
- The same approach applies to any Dynamics 365 record: quotes, orders, opportunities, and more
The Setup: More Than Just Cheese
This isn't a startup experimenting with CRM. It's an established dairy manufacturer running production at scale, managing everything from cheese to ice cream to packaged frozen meals.
Behind the scenes, the company runs a customized Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise system to manage something far less glamorous than dairy: product specifications. Ingredients, packaging details, inventory data, finished goods, every record connected to every other record, like a spreadsheet's worst nightmare.
The Problem: When "New Version" Means "Start Over"
Here's the quiet productivity killer hiding in a lot of CRM setups: there was no efficient way to version a product.
Need to update packaging on an existing SKU? In most systems, that means either:
- Editing the live production record (risky - one typo and your active inventory data is wrong), or
- Manually rebuilding the entire record from scratch (slow and painfully repetitive)
The team needed a third option: clone the record, edit the clone, leave the original untouched.
The Numbers That Made This Urgent
A single packaging update initiative touched more than 550 inventory items. Recreating each one manually took 30 to 45 minutes.
Do that math and it stings:
| Time per record | Total for 550 items |
| 30 minutes | ~275 hours |
| 45 minutes | ~412.5 hours |
That's 7 to 10 full workweeks, for one person, doing nothing but copy-paste-level busywork. And that figure doesn't even include reviewing the records, fixing mistakes, or literally anything else that person was hired to do.
The Fix: Click2Clone
The team implemented Click2Clone, a built to do exactly one thing extremely well: duplicate CRM records, standard or custom, single or bulk, shallow or deeply nested, without the manual re-entry.
Instead of building templates from a blank page, the team built cloning templates, each configured for a specific business scenario:
New Version Creation
Clone the live production record, update version-specific fields, and work on the copy, while the original stays exactly as it was. No risk to active data.
New Product Creation
Launching a similar product? Clone the closest existing record, swap the unique identifiers, and only edit what's actually different. Everything else carries over automatically.
Bulk Cloning
This is where the 550-item packaging update stopped being terrifying. Click2Clone let the team select multiple records at once and clone them together, not one painstaking record at a time.
Inogic even built a custom enhancement so the team could update required fields (like version and status) during the bulk clone itself, no follow-up editing pass required.
Why This Actually Mattered: Related Records, Not Just Fields
Cloning a product record isn't just about the parent record, it's about everything hanging off it. Miss a related child record during a manual rebuild, and you've got an incomplete, inconsistent product spec quietly living in your CRM.
Click2Clone clones the relationships, not just the record. Whatever's configured in the template, ingredients, packaging line items, related child records, travels with the clone automatically.
The Results
- New product versions created without touching active production records
- Large-scale inventory updates handled at 550+ item scale, without 400+ hours of manual labor
- Related records stayed accurate and connected
- Reusable templates turned a one-off fix into a repeatable process
Beyond Dairy: Who Else Has This Problem?
This isn't a dairy-industry quirk. It's a CRM-at-scale problem:
- Manufacturers revising product specs
- Distributors creating similar inventory records
- Sales teams duplicating quotes, orders, or opportunities
Anywhere a "new" record is really 90% identical to an existing one, manual data entry is a hidden tax on your team's time.
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FAQs
How to duplicate a record in Dynamics 365?
Instead of manually re-entering data, teams use Click2Clone to copy an existing record, along with its related child records, in one click.
How to create a new product version without changing the original record?
Clone the existing production record with Click2Clone, make changes on the copy, and leave the original untouched until the new version is ready to go live.
Best way to update hundreds of records in CRM at once?
Bulk cloning tools like Click2Clone let you select multiple records and duplicate them together, instead of processing each one individually, turning hundreds of hours of manual work into a few clicks.
Can Dynamics 365 update fields automatically when cloning records in bulk?
Yes. With the right configuration, a bulk cloning tool like Click2Clone can update required fields, such as version and status, during the clone itself, removing the need for manual edits afterward.
Does cloning a record also copy related child records?
Yes, when using Click2Clone, related child records (ingredients, line items, packaging details, etc.) are cloned along with the parent record based on configured relationships, nothing gets left behind.
Is record cloning only useful for manufacturing companies?
No. Any Dynamics 365 user duplicating products, quotes, orders, or opportunities can use Click2Clone the same way, the underlying problem of re-entering near-identical data isn't industry-specific.